Science Friday - Hum Of The Universe, Cephalopod Event In Miami. June 30, 2023, Part 1

Episode Date: June 30, 2023

Scientists Can Now Hear The Background Hum Of The Universe For the first time ever, scientists have heard the “low pitch hum” of gravitational waves rippling through the cosmos. It’s this ever-present background noise set off by the movement of massive objects—like colliding black holes—throughout the universe. Scientists have theorized that it’s been there all along, but we haven’t been able to hear until now. So what does this hum tell us about our universe? SciFri producer Kathleen Davis talks with science writer Maggie Koerth about this discovery, as well as other science news of the week. They chat about the possibility of an icy planet hiding in the Milky Way, air quality problems due to wildfire smoke, an experimental weight loss drug that’s currently being tested, if our human ancestors were cannibals, and how dolphin moms use baby talk with their calves.   Celebrating The Weird, Wonderful World Of Cephalopods Every year, Cephalopod Week reminds us of the fascinating and weird world of these sea creatures. And in this segment, recorded live at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science Auditorium, two cephalopod scientists share new research about our squishy sea-faring neighbors, how climate change is affecting squids and octopuses, and why they love working with them. Ira Flatow talked to Dr. Lynne Fieber PhD., professor of marine biology and ecology who has studied the nervous systems of all types marine invertebrates including cephalopod and sea slugs, and Dr. Andrea Durant Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in the Grosell Environmental Physiology and Toxicology Lab, who studies how tiny glass squid live in a rapidly-changing ocean.   To stay updated on all-things-science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters. Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. And I'm SciFRI producer Kathleen Davis. Ira and I are hosting together this week. Later in the hour, a trip to Miami for our Cephalopod Week, Cephalobration. But first, big space news dropped this week. For the first time ever, scientists heard the hum of gravitational waves rippling through the cosmos. It's the kind of background noise set off by the motion of massive objects throughout the universe. Here to tell you. talk about this cosmic news and more is Maggie Kerth, science writer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Maggie, welcome back. Hi, thanks for having me. So Maggie, talk me through this big physics news. So first off, you kind of have to understand a little bit about what these gravitational waves are. So imagine this entire universe exists on a giant trampoline. And if somebody bounced or moved around, there'd be a movement in the fabric near you, even if they were really far away, it might be just this very faint movement. And that's this basic idea behind a decades-long effort to document the existence of these gravitational waves. They're just kind of like the movement in the fabric of spacetime itself caused by things like black holes colliding. Okay, so how did scientists actually figure this out? Yeah. So what the scientists figured out this week is that they

announced that they'd captured evidence of these waves, and it's not the first time this has happened. You might remember a big gravitational wave discovery back in 2015, for instance. But what makes this different is that these are really massive black holes that are colliding, and they're also much farther away. The waves, the movement in the fabric has much longer wavelengths. Kind of imagine the difference between a child sort of bouncing nearby you on the trampoline and two full-grown adults bouncing on a trampoline that stretches five miles away from you. To measure something that far and big, scientists had to develop a completely different way of going about the measurement process. And their solution was to hack the universe and turn the whole

universe into a detection system. And to do this, they studied these natural radio waves that are produced by quickly spinning collapsed stars. We're talking about things of are rotating several hundred times a second. And those rotations mean that the radio wave signal produced by the star goes in and out of line with Earth at regular intervals. You could call them pulses, hence the name pulsars. So by monitoring dozens of these pulsars for more than 15 years, the scientists were able to spot the times when gravitational waves jiggled the signal between Earth and the pulsars. So what does this tell us about the universe?

I mean, this seems like it might be pretty important in the world of physics. Yeah, well, first they want more data to verify it. The scientists were very careful not to fully claim discovery this week. There's a lot of like sort of talking around like, oh, we found evidence that could lead to a discovery kind of hedging. But one thing they're hoping for is that as they bring in more of this evidence, they might be able to figure out where the signals are coming from, which is to say where a pair of black holes are actually colliding in space. And they could point their telescopes there, and they could see one for the very first time.

Okay, so let's move on to more space news. There could be an icy hidden planet in our galaxy, more specifically in the Orte Cloud. But, Maggie, what is that? Besides a wonderful thing to say over and over again. The Ork Cloud is a basically like imagine a giant sphere of snowballs surrounding our entire solar system. And you've kind of got the idea. Only the snowballs in this case would be sort of frozen bits and bobs of planet making material, something that scientists call planetism.

And they were left over from the formation of our actual solar system planets, but they got thrown away from the sun by the planet's gravity. at least this is the theory. The Orch Cloud is one of those things in space that is predicted to exist, but we don't actually know for certain that it does. No one's ever seen it. It's so far away that Voyager 1 is going to take 300 years to reach the edge. Wow. Yeah. So all of that background is important because a recent simulation of the mechanics of the early solar system suggests that there's a decent chance that it's not just planetimals out there in the Ork cloud. there could be a real full-scale rogue planet floating around out there.

And the simulations suggest that there's a 0.5% chance that a planet formed in our solar system and got thrown into the Ork Cloud by the gravity of all of the other planets. But the more cool possibility and the more likely one, there's a 7% chance that our Ork Cloud snagged a whole planet from some other solar system. Well, we'll just have to use our imaginations, I guess. But let's come back down to Earth for our next story. And Earth is having some serious climate-related air quality problems. A few weeks ago here in New York City, the air was this murky orange color. And now I'm hearing that the Midwest is getting the worst of it. I mean, what's happening? Yeah, we had a, I'm in Minneapolis. We had a terrible week of air quality. Chicago on Tuesday. literally have the worst air quality in the world. And this is not the only time it's happened in the Midwest this summer.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Minneapolis had the worst air quality in the nation. And that was a day when being outside was the equivalent of smoking half a pack of cigarettes. Wow. We've just been getting hit by these repeated waves of barbecued air on a massive scale. And it's all thanks to one of the worst forest fire years on record in Canada. As of Tuesday afternoon, there were four. 488 fires burning in Canada, and more than half of them were listed as out of control. Smoke had even reached all the way to Europe.

Wow. I mean, how do we keep ourselves safe? Fire season, though, typically peaks in Canada in July and August, so you can really expect more of this to come. And what experts recommend are a range of things. The first option is to basically stay inside with the windows shut and the AC running continuously, not just on auto cycle so that you're sort of filtering the air as it comes into you. But if you have to be outside, you should be avoiding strenuous activities like jogging or mowing the lawn on bad air quality days. And masks can also help, particularly in 95 masks. They won't filter out any like toxic gases that are in the smoke, but they will reduce the amount of those tiny particles that get into your

lungs and throat and irritate things and lead to this scratchy throat situation that I am experiencing. right this moment. Well, please stay safe out there, Maggie, and everyone else who's listening. Now onto some other health news, there is a new weight loss drug that is currently being tested. Maggie, can you tell us about this? Yeah, so this is kind of part and parcel with the weight loss drugs that you've really heard about in the news all this past year, Munjaro and Ozimic. Eli Lilly released results of a phase two clinical trial this week that showed this new drug could have results that are just as good, if not better than those. In an 11-month trial, people taking the new drug lost 24.2 percent of their body weight on average. Wow. Yeah, it's a lot. The existing drugs,

Munjarro and Ozenpric are in the same ballpark, 15 to 20 percent of body weight on average for the same length of trial, according to an article in nature. So what we're talking about is really this market for pharmaceutical weight loss expanding and becoming available to more people. And that could be good, but it could also be a problem. Yeah. So like you said, I mean, people in these trials have lost almost a quarter of their weight on average. Is that safe? Well, that's one of the things that doctors are kind of trying to figure out a little bit. You know, the main side effects of these drugs for the most part have been nausea and vomiting. But doctors have expressed a lot of concern about the increasing use of these drugs by people who

are not actually diabetic or obese and who aren't being monitored for malnutrition by regular doctor visits. So these are drugs also that you basically have to take indefinitely to maintain results. And they're drugs that can and some people just wipe out the desire to eat much at all. And that is kind of obviously not very healthy. Let us move on to our next story, which I'm struggling with how to transition into this one coming from that story. But this story is about how our ancient ancestors may have been cannibals. Maggie, how did scientists figure this out? Yeah, there's a diet joke in there somewhere, but I don't know what it is.

Yeah, I'm not even going to try. So scientists have found a 1.45 million-year-old hominin tibia that shows signs of having been cut with stone tools. That is to say, the proto person the shin bone belonged to, was probably both. and likely eaten by its peers. And no one knows what specific species the bone came from, just that it's a human ancestor. And there's other evidence that exists that hominins were at least sometimes eating each other. There's a similarly aged skull from South Africa that has kind of the same kind of cut marks. But this tibia is important because it was found in a part of what's now Kenya,

where the fossil record shows no contemporaneous signs of funeral rituals, which would be your kind of possible alternate explanation for why hominins might be cutting the flesh off of each other's bones. I want to wrap up with my favorite story of the week. A new study showed that mama dolphins use baby talk with their calves, which is so cute. How do those calls sound different from what a mom would maybe whistle to another adult dolphin? The scientists kind of studied these 19 mother dolphins who had been captured temporarily for health assessments. And basically, just like humans, when we're talking to babies, we're sort of getting up into that higher register and kind of having a little bit more spread of the tone also.

And it doesn't happen all the time. It's something that we have yet to observe in wild, non-human-centric dolphin behavior. But it's really interesting. And also it's kind of cute. Okay, so let's take a listen. We have a clip from the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program of a dolphin without her baby. And now we have a clip of Mama Dolphin with her baby. Okay, I can tell that there's a little bit of a difference. But what could this mom dolphin be saying? Do we know? Well, so this kind of comes back to another really cool fact about dolphins, which is,

that they kind of have names. Each dolphin has this little unique whistle that is sort of this identifier of themselves. And they'll go around sort of like shouting it to let other dolphins know where they are. And so what this is is the mother dolphins kind of expressing their names to their babies, according to an article in science news.

So cute. Maggie Kerth is a science writer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Maggie, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. Up next, Ira takes us to Miami for our favorite time of the year, Cephalopod Week. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato,

joining you from the University of Miami Rosensteel School of Marine Atmospheric and Earth Science in Miami, Florida. My guests are two undersea experts here to help us celebrate Cephalopod Week, our yearly celebration of all things, octopus, squid, and cuttlefish.

Let me introduce them. My first guest is Dr. Lynn Feber, professor of marine biology and ecology here at the university. She has studied the nervous system of all types of marine invertebrates, including sea slugs and our favorite cephalopods. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you, Ira. Also with me is Dr. Andrea Durant, a postdoctoral fellow in the gross cell environmental physiology and toxicology lab, who is currently studying how tiny glass squid are faring in a rapidly changing ocean. Welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you for having you. Lynn, you've worked with cephalopods and other mollusks for many years. How do you conduct research with the animals? I mean, what are you trying to uncover with your work? Well, Ira, the nervous system of all animals is basically the same, from squid and octopus up to humans, but also down to snail. and very other more simple forms of life. And so if you want to understand how the nervous system operates

on an elemental level, on a basic level, like the level of cells, or even the level of molecules, working in simple marine organisms is actually a very good way of approaching these ideas. And so if you wanted to know how learning happens or if you wanted to know what a memory is, like if you could hold it in your hand, what is it? Working in a simple animal where you can actually have just a few cells, a few nerve cells that are called neurons,

responsible for a behavior, then that's an advantage. It makes it easier for you to understand what causes behavior, what causes learning. And so what I do is I take the elemental way in which nerve cells communicate, and that's electricity. and I listen to nerve cells talking to one another in the brains of marine animals. And I do this with some sort of sophisticated recording equipment, but basically in a dark room, I just listen to the brain talking to itself.

And it's a tremendous amount of fun. Wow. And in fact, I remember when Eric Candel won the Nobel Prize for working with... Absolutely. He actually recorded single-single. cells, is possible to do that? You can listen to one cell? How do you do that? You have a probe that's tiny enough? Yes, you have a little glass electrode that's filled with seawater and you

poke it into the cell and then you have some sophisticated recording equipment, very sensitive. And if you want, you can look at it visually. You can look at squiggles on your oscilloscope. Or you can translate it into music and listen to it. So honestly. Wow. The songs of the cells of the cephalopods. I think we've got something here. Now, Andrea, your research doesn't focus so much on neurobiology, right, but on the physiology of a small cephalopod called the glass squid. Tell us what that, what is a glass squid, and what do you do with? Yes, a glass squid. They're actually quite abundant in the pelagic and deep sea. They, you would hear them as cockatoo squid as well. And they actually look a lot like jelly. So I don't think a lot of people realize they're looking at

squid when they see them. These are really, really cool animals. They're really abundant. And what I'm really interested in is they use a really unique strategy for buoyancy. And that's very different than the shallow water squids that you're commonly probably used to seeing. Octopods or octopuses use a very different strategy as well. They crawl and swim on the bottom. Shallow water squids are actively swimming and use jet propulsion like many cephalopods species. and it's an elaborate funnel locking mechanism, and it's really, really interesting. But these squids are fascinating

in that they do things very differently, and they hold on to a waste product and basically create a fluid that is just a little bit less dense than seawater, and that accounts for their body weight and gives them lift. And so what that's known at is neutral buoyancy, and they basically are the same density of seawater,

and that really is an advantage in the deep sea because they can use less energy dedicated to swimming and such. Yeah, if you're a scuba diver, you know all about. Exactly. So they're really old-time scuba divers is what they're doing. How did you get interested in this? Were you always working with them? Yeah, so one of my advisors said I would make everything about ammonia,

and this is true, and it seems to have followed me to the Rosenstil School. The bread and butter of what I do is really looking at how animals use this waste product, how they excrete it. And there's a lot of peculiar ways that animals use ammonia. And this is a common waste product. Humans excrete it as urea. So your urine is very high in levels of urea.

So most aquatic animals will flush ammonia out of their gills or gill-like structures or in the urine or in the feces. And these squid decide to hold on to it in really high levels that would kill probably most cells and organs and animals in general. And they do this in a specialized chamber that they possess that is not seen in many squid families.

And, yeah. Fascinating. Yeah. I can see why you're interested in it. Yes. Yeah. No, I mean, it's fascinating. You know.

I will say that it's a strategy about half of squid families used. And yeah, so these are really interesting and that they really use the specialized chamber for buoyancy instead of air. That's cool. Yeah. That's very cool. I know that cephalopods are kind of mollusk, but you work on the sea slug. Is there a connection? Oh, yes.

So I work on a type of marine snail that's called the California Sea Here and is sometimes called a slug. It is a marine animal and it is uniquely suited for studies of learning and memory because even though it only has a few thousand nerve cells in its brain, which is really not very many, you have 86 billion nerve cells in your brains, and cephalopods have half a billion nerve cells in their brain. So if you have an action or a procedure that you've taught this animal, there are only a few nerve cells involved,

and so that makes it a lot easier to sort of track down exactly what the change is in those nerve cells when the animal learns or when it ages or something like that. And so that's the animal that I work on. So you can apply that to the other cephalopods, the kinds that we're talking about? Absolutely, absolutely. The general premise that we all work on is that we try to understand a biological concept in a simple organism first.

We call that a model. And once we've nailed it down, once we know what that learning is, then we test out our hypothesis on a more complex animal. Whereas a sea hare can be had for about $20, after we rear it here at the Rosa Steele School. And squids and octopus for research are extremely hard to come by. They are intelligent animals. We don't want to mess with them, number one.

They are capable of such complex learning. Give me an example of that. Yeah. So one of the most astounding things I think, when you think about an octopus's capabilities for learning how to hunt and how to interact with this environment, is that it knows them as soon as it hatches out, right? I mean, they hatch out as little miniatures of the adults.

And they only live for a year. So they have an awful lot to accomplish in that year. They have to hunt and explore their environment and find mates and breed and then die. And so in an experimental sense, in the laboratory, for example, you might teach an octopus to not attack a new stimulus in its environment. That can be done. you can teach the octopus to not react. Its normal tendency would be to immediately attack a new stimulus in its environment. Something in its tank?

That's right. And by attack, I mean go after it, handle it, try to see if it's edible, of course. You always want to know that if it's edible, especially if it's something new. A lot of us like that. Right. Absolutely. Of course, if it's a threat, you want to be proactive, right? You know, you want to be the master of your domain and you want to actually address that threat.

head on. So you can teach the octopus to not do that. And it isn't easy for the octopus to restrain itself from that normal impulse. And you do this by either giving a reward or a punishment. And then you can test out the concept that you have brought to that animal model from an earlier animal model with just a few thousand nerve cells and test it out and find out now if you've got a nerve net with thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of neurons trying to communicate with one another to enable that octopus to not act on its instinct and attack that new stimulus, then you can learn more about that process. And of course, these things are conserved right on up the family tree in primates like ourselves

and all other animals as well. So this is the beauty of animal models from the marine realm, particularly, because you've got so much potential there. Wow, that's an interesting story. I didn't realize how long it would take to do that. I didn't realize that an octopus lives a year. It has a lot to do in that one year. Yes, and what I like to tell students is that if octopuses lived for a dozen years or 80 years, like humans, they'd take over the world. They absolutely.

There'd be no stopping them, obviously. If they had that much time to consolidate their knowledge, they'd be unstoppable. If I could, one other thing, which is just fascinating to me, is that the cephalopods and all invertebrates that we've been discussing so far, these are animals that don't have a spinal cord, and so they have a brain that's a little bit different structure from vertebrates like us and dogs and cats. and whales and other fish.

And cephalopods have such sophisticated capabilities for learning and for exploiting their environment, interacting with it. We have begun to think that when comes to cephalopause, they have almost what we consider to be a parallel evolution for the way their brain works and actual consciousness. And we didn't used to think this. We used to think that all invertebrates were just the precursors of the vertebrates. They were just, you know, various models that evolution came up with before the real event,

you know, primates and that sort of thing. But now we've come to think of the sophisticated invertebrates like cephalopause is actually having almost a parallel evolution to their way of dealing with the world. And that's an extremely exciting concept, to have two chances, invertebrates and vertebrates to figure out how to reach an intelligence, you know, in... Wow. And maybe take over the world if they were. I see this made-for-TV script going on right now.

Invasion of the octopuses. Okay. Andrew, I know your research subject, the extremely tiny glass squid, and I can't stress this really enough. They're really tiny, right? Does this make it hard to work with them in the lab if they're that small? Great question. I think that with my background,

from dissecting mosquitoes and and Daphnea, which are tiny little crustaceans. And from my perspective, no, it's actually a breath of fresh air. They're pretty big. They're ginormous, you know, and I can dissect it with the naked eye. But from a mechanistic viewpoint, we have no idea how exactly these animals produced and retain this much ammonia and how they don't die in the process of retaining this ammonia. and this can be really applied to all the species in the deep sea that utilize this strategy, which is many of them. It seems to be a parallel strategy that arose for buoyancy,

that really is great for mitigating energy and other things. Do you have to be like a surgeon with tiny little tools? Yes, we have micro tools that we use. Everything is underneath the microscope, so really teasing apart the different organs and such is a task, but it's an interesting one. But, yeah, I feel like a mini-surgeon. I usually joke that I could just perform any surgeries after these. We sort of have a doctor in the house.

Yeah, exactly, yeah. If you don't have a spine. I'm not even going to go there. Let me take a moment to remind our listeners, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Let's talk about the ocean. itself and how, Andre, I'll ask you also Lynn, changes in the ocean chemistry and temperature might affect these animals. Yes. And I'm talking global warming, climate change, things like that.

Absolutely. It seems to the contrary, cephalopod abundances, at least squid, are booming right now. This is thought to be due to a variety of reasons, I think, from overfishing of a lot of the predator species that would normally eat these squid. They're really thriving. in a warming and warmer ocean. Species that were never found year-round in the Arctic are being sampled there year-round. So we know a lot from historical records, how their abundances are changing.

And there's now residents in northern climates that were never there. Do we know why, or suspect why? Yes. I think that they can respond biologically very easily to changing ocean conditions, even in an individual's lifetime. Soon they'll live 8 to 12.

years. They just need a day or two to adjust to. So salinity, temperature, hypoxia, so decreasing dissolved oxygen in the water. Ocean acidification does not really seem to affect. Yeah. So there's not a lot of studies, but in terms of metabolism, they do just fine. So from that perspective right now, they're actually extremely abundant. The other cephalopods too, or just the octopus? My knowledge is restricted to squids, so I can't speak to, and I will say that coastal species are going to experience more exacerbated changes, and those are shown to have some effects. So, but pelagic squid right now are doing quite well. I think their biggest concern or biggest threat is deep sea exploration, so a lot of mining and for oils, minerals, gas, the risk of spills with the deep water horizon spill

in the Gulf of Mexico, and how it affects, in my case, deep sea. see animals such as these squid. That seems to be the most imminent threat. And we don't really know a lot, if anything, about the biology of these squids, let alone how they're going to respond to these changing conditions. So really, that's where I'm starting. It's just to figure out how these animals work and then apply some of these climate change scenarios to... So we're all just doing a big climate experiment here in the ocean. Absolutely. Lynn, do you have any insight in what the future might be? I think just to add to what Andy said, I think that the threats to coastal octopuses is overfishing. Many countries have absolutely no regulations about how much they can collect.

And octopuses are a very important keystone species in a lot of reef environments, coastal environments. You take out the octopuses and the lobster, you know, two things that people love to eat when they're on vacation, for example. And suddenly you have a... explosion of things like urchins that might be have in in great numbers when they are allowed to really bloom, have negative effects on coastal environments because they're usually kept in check by animals like that. And so that's, I think, the main threat that we've got in terms of the coastal species of cephalopause is that they're being overfished. Interesting. We'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday from WNYC

studios. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato, joining you from the University of Miami Rosensteel School of Marine Atmospheric and Earth Science in Miami, Florida. Let's see if we can get some audience questions. I want to have people get ready to line up and get ready to ask questions. Here comes the mic. It's going to be coming down. Okay, go ahead, sir. Let's see if that's work. Hi, good evening. It's interesting, you mention how intelligent octopuses are, because I know they can solve puzzles and they've even recognized people. And being so intelligent, I normally thought intelligence led to longevity in a long-term life. But why hasn't that translated into a long life for an octopus when they're so smart,

but they're limited to only one or two years of living? Good question. It is a good question. So the simple answer is that octopuses have, they have programs, self-referrales. destruction that is hormonal. And when they're about 10 or 11 months old, there are hormones that are not ordinarily coursing through their bloodstream become active, and they literally kill themselves with these hormones. They self-destruct. And the only way to prevent them from activating this kill switch is to remove part of their brains called the optic glands, where the hormones are

produced. And if you do that, the animal will retreat from sexual maturity and can live another year. Wow. Yeah. It's just how they're built. Oh, so they're not living eight to 12 years yet. Yes, ma'am. So the first question, so it's very small. How you monitor the sea hairs, is it invasive or is it like an ECG method? No. It's a really good question. I'm glad you asked it because we may as well be truthful. I take their brains out. I anesthetize them, and I dissect them with teeny tools, and take out the brains,

and then I break apart the nerve cells so that I get down to the individual neurons, and then I poke them with my glass electrode. That's just, like, my own morbid curiosity. I need to follow up on that question, because I used to know a very well-known marine biologist, and he was a hematologist in North Carolina, and he worked at Duke,

and a trawler would go out all the time and scoop up all these fish, bring them back so he could get the blood and study the blood, and he'd have a terrific boule-based dinner that night. Any similarity here to when you... It's, you know, we used to have a policy in the pleia facility where we're growing these animals, where new people had to, as an initiation right, had to taste sea hair sushi.

And it's awful. They use pigments from their food and other compounds from their food as a chemical defense. They put it into the flesh, the skin, to deter predators. And that's what you're eating when you sample sea hair sashimi. It's not tasty. You know what, every year when we do cephalopod, we always will get a call from a listener about calamari. We try to get our tiptoe around that issue,

but everybody still wants to think of calamari when they talk about. You had a second part to that question? Yes, so you said when you take away the self-destruction, they only live in an additional year? Is it, so why is it only an additional year? So basically the cells of the body, organs, they're just not built to last. They're built to last that one year. They, you know, they live fast and die young. Is that true of squid? Yeah, I will say that that pelagic squid

are some of the most metabolically active animals and, and they burn through a lot of energy. They burn fast, yeah. But what is the evolutionary advantage to that if you're going to live fast and die young, right? You're not going to be spreading your genes that much. But they produce a lot of offspring. Especially squid. My goodness, yes. How many offspring do squid? Oh, hundreds per clutch. And how many clutches do we? I don't know, actually. Yearly, half a dozen? Yeah, something like that. Yeah, at least, minimum. So how many of those individual offspring actually survive or don't get eaten by? Great question. Probably very few of them compared to the adults that you would feed. So they help feed the rest of the Yeah. The larva are planktonic and they basically just drift in the open water column. So great food for a lot of other animals that are in the water column.

The web of life. Yeah. Doesn't the movie? Yes. So this is a stupid question, but I add on questions. So for people like me who will eat anything, any meat, but I won't eat cephalopods. Is there a word for us? I think we should invent one. Do you have a suggestion? Acephlepodian? I don't know. Acephlepotian, that's a good one. I like it.

Okay, let's go ahead. Good evening. Thank you for coming tonight. I read that octopuses have about 33,000 genes, about 10,000 more than humans. What are they doing with those extra one-third genes for their advantage? This is a tremendous question. We've been studying this in my lab, too. They've got a tremendous number of rough drafts in their genome.

Genes that can do a job, but they don't have just two alleles. They have numerous, many, many opportunities for that gene to be expressed with small changes, small differences in the protein sequence that's coded for and that sort of thing. And for an animal that has a 500 million year history on this earth, it's probably not a bad idea to have spares. And that's my perception. I'm not a hardcore molecular biologist, but that's my perception. They've got a lot of stuff to continue to play with over historical time

to improve their species. Wow, interesting. Yes. I saw this video a while ago. It was like some study or test. It was on some sea creature. I forget what it was. But there's these two doors.

One opened immediately and one open 15 minutes later. And the study was to see if it could have like judgment and understand time. And they put an oral piece of food behind the one that opened immediately and a more desirable one behind the one that opened later. And since you're talking about an octopus being able to recognize people. itself and other octopi, my question is how complex is an octopus's sense of judgment? That's a wonderful question, and it is. What you've described could be an octopus experiment. The octopus would excel at that particular task. It's called operant conditioning, delayed gratification. So you pass up an immediate reward for the promise of a better reward later, and even the sea hares

can learn that. It's a really essential capability in the brains of animals. That's the marshmallow test in people, isn't it? You give kids a marshmallow and you give them an option. You can have the marshmallow now or you can wait and get something better later. Like a some more? Okay. Five of them. Oh yeah, five of them. And whether they will actually wait or not and they make a judgment about that. So the octopuses could do that better than human children who probably would take the one

marshmallow, right? Yeah. Some of them. Speaking of human children. Yes, ma'am. So I have a question. Like, how do octopuses change color? Yeah. How do they do that?

Okay. So they have skin that's very reactive and that contains little color sacks distributed throughout the skin and lots of little muscles around every color sack that either can contract it or expand it. And when it's expanded, that color sack is seen on the skin. And so that's one of the ways that they change color. And they can produce very complex color patterns like the floor. The floor here isn't blue or gray. It's. It's a lot of different colors, right?

The octopus or the squid could reproduce this plaid with their skin by use of this color sac layer that's controlled by muscles and then some reflective layers underneath that so that they can shimmer and be a perfect thing to dress up for Halloween as. Dress up as an octopus for Halloween. You've got all those different changes. But so that means that they have nerves that control each one of those colors? A nerve for each one.

Yeah, this is one of the reasons they've got half a billion nerve cells is that's pretty inefficient, actually, to do it that way. Fish, do it with hormones. They say, heck with the muscle thing. Let's just have the color sacks expand or contract by hormonal means. But that means they can't do it as quickly, I would imagine. Oh, they can. They can.

But there's a cost. There's a cost. They have to have a lot of their body. brain devoted to a pretty minor thing. Well, not if you're an octopus. It might not be judgment like that. I'm sorry. Yes, sir.

Two questions. First one is I read a book by Ed Young, an immense world where he talks about senses and how humans sense the world and how animals sense the world. Can you tell us about senses maybe we don't know about and cephalopause? Yeah, they have the ability to see into parts of the visual spectrum that we can't,

and they can also see polarized light. Now that I've just said that, I have seen studies that suggest that cephalopods can see polarization of light. This is extremely useful in the marine realm, so you can tell what time of day it is, that sun angle coming through various ocean layers. So those are visual acuities that we... lack. You know, our eyesight, as far as the animal kingdom goes, is pretty poor. Let's see, they have tremendous mechanoreceptive capabilities. They have a very, very sensitive sense of touch. So rather than having new senses, they've got, you know, sort of supercharged senses that are the

same ones that we've got. Wow. Nice. I'll add to that. It seems like they also heavily rely on taste over things like olfaction that other crustaceans, for example, use heavily. So chemoreception is not a big of an influence versus them tasting as they go along. Interesting. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. A great audience and asking those questions. Let me take a moment to remind our listeners, this is Science Friday, from WNYC Studios. Just a couple of more questions. And these are, I think, kinds of questions I'd like to ask because I imagine when your students come to work with you with these creatures, they must be the first time they're getting really close to them, right?

And what are they most surprised by when you work with them? You know, when I first introduce students, undergraduate college students, or high school students to these animals, they're not seeing them in bags. They're seeing them actually in open-topped aquariums. So I, you know, dig in and pick one up and hand it. to the students. And the thing that most surprises them is how slimy they are. I had one little third grader once. She had really came up with a perfect description.

She said, it feels like a chicken breast that my mom just took out of the refrigerator. That's good. It's cold and slimy. Why is it so rare that we see the giant squid in, you know, a living one? What makes it so rare? Great question. I will say that. that one of the advantages of studying the small squid is because we can't catch these giant squid to understand how they use ammonium for buoyancy and a lot of what we know is from dead dead animals that have been captured at the surface.

They're pretty deep. These giant squid are deep dwelling and it sounds like they really just surface when they are dead, although there have been recent instances where they've been filmed quite shallow. But yeah, that's one of the challenges of a deep dwelling animal. And Lynn, what's the biggest challenge in your study? Let me amend that, because I have a blank check in my backpack.

How did you know I was going to say money? I talked to a lot of scientists. Answer is always the same. If I were to give you that blank check, what would you spend it? What do you want to know? What kind of equipment would you like to be invented? that doesn't work or doesn't exist yet?

What is the biggest mystery for you? And I'll ask that to you, Andrea, after this, that keeps you from knowing more. I think I would like to design an instrument or a series of instruments that could help me understand how huge numbers of neurons in the brain communicate so effectively, so incredibly rapidly. you know, the range of behaviors that an organism engages in

suggest tremendous complexity, and we know that that is the case. And it would be very cool to be able to sort of see it all at once so that you could, at a glance, see, all right, there's operant conditioning going on, there's associative learning, there's, you know, this and that, how those things differ. That's what I would like to know. Andrea, a question for you. Yes, I would say it would be probably more of a technical challenge in terms of actually capturing these squid,

it's very expensive to take these research vessels that are fully equipped with labs and crews. And a lot of the limitations is actually being able to acquire deep sea squid that are below 1,000 meters in depth. So if my name was on a blank check, I would spend it on ways to actually collect and study these squid on board.

And so I envision some sort of device their behavior, but on a ship. And that's as far as I think. We have a lot of creative people listening, so maybe somebody will come up. I want to thank both of you for being with us today. Thank you both so much for taking time to be here tonight. Dr. Lynn Feber, professor of marine biology and ecology,

Dr. Andrea Durant, postdoctoral fellow in the Grossell, environmental physiology and toxicology lab. They both join me here at the University of Miami Rosensteele School of Marine atmospheric and earth science in Miami, Florida. Thank you, Ira. Thanks, Ira, for hosting such a great live event. Can't wait to cephalobrate all over again next year. And that's all the time we have for this hour.

Here's some of the folks who help make this show happen. Our radio producers are me, Kathleen Davis, Shoshana Bucksbaum, D. Peter Schmidt, and Rasha Aidi. Diana Plasker is our experiences manager. B.J. Leaderman, composed our third. theme music. If you missed any part of this program or you'd like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Every day now is Science Friday. Say hi to us on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or email us. The address is SciFri at ScienceFri.com. Send us

feedback and tell us what you'd like us to cover too. I'm Kathleen Davis. Have a great weekend.